TEN YEARS MORE MEAT RATIONING FOR GT. BRITAIN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 84, 9 May 1949, Page 5

TEN YEARS MORE MEAT RATIONING FOR GT. BRITAIN

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) London, April 18.

Ten years is one high ranking estimate of the time before Britain can deration meat. Other estimates range down to five years. All agree that meat will be the last food derationed in this vegetaians’ Valhalla. Fats, including butter and cheese, will be rationed for fewer years. Viewing this prospect, critics have pointed from austere Britain to substantially unrationed Europe. Food Minister John Strachey’s reply is that he could deration meat right now at the French price of 5/a pound; the inference being that the working class housewife would get rather less then than she does now.

West Europe Worse Off Spare Stafford Cripps crisply asserts that 80 per cent of the peoples of unregulated Western Europe are; worse off for food than their oppo-' site numbers in Britain. It is not questioned that the patrons of glossy Continental hotels may be better off than in Britain. For this the British Government makes no apology.

Able Edith Summerskill, who confesses to bringing an excess stone of off-ration avoirdupois back from her tour of New Zealand and Australia, calculates that an unrationed Britain would consume meat equivalent to a ration of 205 a head. This.was when the ration, lowered in quantity by Peron, but not yet restored in price by Cripps, stood at Bd.

Were ample supplies available, it is reckoned the British today would eat more meat and fats than before the war. The Ministry of Food’s task is considerably more than the restoration of 1939 standards. Rationed By Price

Seeing shops well-stocked with tinned foods which New Zealanders would rate as semi luxuries, visitors are apt td ignore the rationing imposed by purse strings. Unsubsidised, these lines are generally beyond the reach of any except well-to-do housewives. For this reason they remain a spectacle in shop windows. * • Vegetables are cheap and plentiful, while fruit, though not what it was prewar, is plentiful enough in season. Britons tend to miss out of season fruit once imported from the Mediterranean area.

Bulk buying comes * under fire from time to time in the Commons. Ministry of Food of-

ficials answer Conservative condemnation of the system of asking what New Zealand farmers think of having an assured market for seven years’ full production, and by asking who but a Government could give the ten year guarantee Australia

wants before embarking on the Northern Territory meat scheme.

Conservatives have not made it clear how they would combine the incentives and price benefits they claim for free enterprise with the incentives a guaranteed market offers the producer. One suggestion advanced is that the Government should give guarantees as it does now, then turn free enterprise to work buying and selling, limiting the Government’s suty to uplifting and paying fof whatever portion of the guaranteed quantity free enterprise did not take up. To the student of British table talk, it is not always clear where dinner ends and politics begin.